Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize, received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and appears in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, Fatal Flaw, and translated to Italian in Spazinclusi. Her translations appear in World Literature Today and The Apple Valley Review. Born in San Angelo, TX, she's lived in New Orleans and now lives with her husband in New York City. Sister Creatures is her debut novel.
At Electric Lit Green tagged "ten books, all published within the last decade, feature some sort of entity or presence that looms over the lives of their characters, and they’re all incredibly enjoyable reads." One title on the list:
Little Eyes by Samanta SchweblinRead about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.
There are two types of people in the world of Schweblin’s captivating novel: keepers & dwellers. Either you keep a Kentuki—a toy of uncannily janky quality, made to resemble various animals such as crows, moles, and pandas—or youdwell in one, surveilling your keeper through a concealed camera and microphone. A keeper and dweller are paired together randomly, from any place on the planet. A keeper might want a companion, or maybe a captive audience for their exhibitionist tendencies, or perhaps simply the newest product on shelves. A dweller might be experiencing a crushing loneliness, or they may be a pedophile hoping for a victim, or they’re someone who needs a means of escape from their sad reality. Whether the technology corrupts or simply exacerbates human flaws, with the help of these creepy little inanimate animals, Little Eyes—translated by the great Megan McDowell—explores the dark corners of human psychology.
Little Eyes is among Sara Sligar's four tech thrillers rooted in the tensions between technology & human nature and Rabeea Saleem's six technothrillers featuring digital surveillance and voyeurism.
--Marshal Zeringue
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